


Remedial

by Domenika Marzione (domarzione)



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Education, Gen, Higher Education, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Team as Family, Therapy, Tony Being Tony
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-19
Updated: 2014-07-19
Packaged: 2018-02-09 13:21:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,565
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1984494
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/domarzione/pseuds/Domenika%20Marzione
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><b>re·me·di·al</b><br/><i>adjective</i><br/>1. affording remedy; tending to remedy something.<br/>2. intended to correct or improve one's skill in a specified field: remedial math.</p><p> </p><p>Steve always knew Bucky was a quick study, so his progress after he comes in from the cold is a 'when' and not an 'if.' The Avengers are a help, except when they're not. But even when they're not, they sort of are.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Remedial

Bucky's return was almost comically anticlimactic; he'd sat down next to Steve on a bench facing the water in Hudson River Park. Not too close, not inside his personal space, nothing that would have made him look up from what he had been doing before a natural pause in the linework.

"I've been looking for you," Steve had said, which hadn't been any of the million things he'd thought he'd have said if he'd ever found Bucky during his globetrotting search, but it wasn't the worst thing he could have blurted out, either.

"I wasn't ready to be found," Bucky had replied. But that had changed, obviously, and he'd followed Steve back to the Tower and had stayed.

It had changed, yes, but not completely. The truth of it was that if Steve was no longer looking for Bucky, Bucky still was looking for himself. He wasn't the Winter Soldier anymore, although that man -- that weapon -- still lived within him. Nor was he Brooklyn's own Bucky Barnes, hero of the dance halls turned Howling Commando, although that man was there, too. He was sometimes betwixt and between and sometimes someone else entirely and it took time and effort for everyone to adapt to that. For Steve and Bucky most of all because the others had only known him as a historical figure and then as a nightmare and it was easy enough to meet the man he was now, whoever that was, and accept him at face value.

It took a long time for Steve to stop feeling jealous and shameful and hurt when Bucky sought out the company of the others not just because he seemed to like them, but instead because they weren't Steve and didn't see him through the prism of memory. It wasn't always something Steve had said or done -- it frequently _wasn't_ because Steve had read enough and been counseled enough to appreciate and apply the fact that the man he'd known was gone for good. But their history was never not the third party in the relationship and sometimes that got too much for Bucky.

(Sometimes it got too much for Steve, too, but he kept that to himself because this wasn't about him.)

Bucky had almost all of his memories, for better or for worse, even if he didn't always know where he'd filed them in a brain that was remarkably intact and undamaged for all that HYDRA had done to it. He didn't remember a lot of things until prompted, which was completely normal (if not for Steve, whose eidetic memory had made it hard to comprehend forgetfulness even before the serum), and not all of the sudden reminders were unpleasant. Bucky went from tasting rosewater in an Indian sweet to asking Steve to verify details about Mrs. Leary, the Barnes's neighbor across the hall where he'd grown up, who'd always worn too much rose perfume but had also always had treats for the Barnes children (and Steve, honorary Barnes child). Which in turn had sent Steve down to Economy Candy on Rivington to pick out a selection of sweets Bucky would remember: rolls of Choward's (especially the violet, which Steve loved and Bucky had violently abhorred), candy cigarettes, raspberry sticks, licorice that tasted like licorice and not whatever Twizzlers were made from. He'd also come back with a king size Hershey bar and watched Bucky's eyes light up like it had been Christmas.

The unpleasant memories were harder to work through and Steve, by necessity, left most of it to the therapist Sam had found and Hill was skimming SHIELD funds to pay for. But Doctor Devadasan wasn't around in the middle of the night and Steve was and so some of it fell to him. Which was why he had his own appointments with Doctor Devadasan, albeit far less frequently than Bucky's. Bucky was rarely violent in the throes of a nightmare, although the rate of pillows and topsheets he went through, especially at the beginning, might've said otherwise. Afterward, sometimes the two of them sat on the couch watching cartoons, sometimes they talked about unrelated things, sometimes Steve ran an insipid monologue until Bucky's eyes cleared and his shoulders relaxed and he was fully present. Oddly enough, Bucky reading the SHIELD/HYDRA files on his activities as the Winter Soldier was sometimes a good thing, too -- in his dreams, a single murder had become a family annihilation, a clean kill turned into a blood-soaked misadventure, and finding out that the truth was only moderately bad instead of monstrous was enough of a relief to make the rest of the night bearable. Which was messed up on its own, but not really all that unusual; all of the Avengers, Steve very much included, had had their worst deeds warped by their nightmares. "Soldiers work on a very different scale," Doctor Devadasan had told them both, together and separately. It took Bucky a long time to accept that the Soldier counted, too, but he was a much happier person once he did.

Bucky's ability to function independently on a day to day level was something all of them tended to overestimate and underestimate, often both at once. Bucky was far more comfortable with most modern technology than Steve had been at a comparable point -- he had no trouble with smartphones and streaming media controls and the solid light displays in Tony's lab and he tended to get annoyed when anyone assumed otherwise. It had taken him fifteen minutes to figure out the personal force field projector Tony was developing (and another ten to break it, although that had been why Tony had given it to him in the first place). But there were gaps in his understanding that none of them -- including Bucky -- could always anticipate. Bucky was good with technology from his time as the Winter Soldier and he was able to cook simple dishes because Mrs. Barnes had decided that he should learn, but his misadventures with the microwave quickly became legendary. The "don't ever put anything metallic in there" lesson was absorbed by the time the fire was extinguished, but it took Bucky longer to accept that there were some foods that were better served by either different means of cooking or more preparation before they were microwaved. Although Steve still wasn't quite sure whether Bucky had really ever believed he could hard-boil an egg in there without any water or if it had just been him being curious and maybe a little bored. The bagel had definitely been an honest effort gone horribly wrong, though.

Away from technology and anything to do with the art of war, Bucky's comfort level was a bit more variable. Self-care was not a problem; Bucky had come back to him clean and clean-shaven and without the Winter Soldier's unruly mop ("the first thing I got rid of once I got my head back on straight"). There'd still been a learning curve and a couple of awkward and hilarious hours of the two of them browsing the website of the online drugstore. It wasn't as if there weren't a Duane Reade or a Rite-Aid or a CVS on every other corner, but Steve had thought (and Doctor Devadasan had concurred) that Bucky wasn't quite up to dealing with the overwhelming options and hadn't done anything in the way of normal purchasing in the twenty-first century, let alone the kind that came with bonus cards and cashiers that had no reason to anticipate needing patience in dealing with this particular customer. Also, the paparazzi tended to loiter around the Tower, hoping to catch a picture of Captain America or Thor buying toothpaste (or, even better, condoms) to sell to the tabloids.

It turned out Bucky liked online ordering, especially because it meant he got to read customer reviews. Amazon had been a revelation and, for the first week after its discovery, Bucky's primary source of entertainment. Which did not mean that Bucky was willing to go along with the recommended gradualist approach to quotidian consumerism and, despite being advised not to and actually promising Steve that he wouldn't, he went over to the D'Agostino's on Third and came back visibly stunned and holding a half-gallon of 2% milk.

"At least you didn't go to the Food Emporium," Steve sighed, putting an arm around Bucky's shoulder and guiding him into the kitchen so they could put the milk away. Steve did his big food shopping online as well, mostly for convenience because midtown was awful for groceries and his crazy schedule made it worse, but doing it online allowed him to surf the Fresh Direct website from the back of a quinjet on the way to or from a mission or simply from his couch. "Next time, take me with you, yeah?"

Bucky soon acquired a list of stores that were Better with Friends, which included K-Mart, Costco and BJs, Ikea, and Target, the latter of which Steve had to explain was actually pronounced how it looked and not "Targé," no matter what Clint and Maria had said. Bucky had bridled at some of the list -- he had gone to the big Macy's in Herald Square a dozen times before he'd ever put on a uniform, it's not as if he'd never seen a big department store -- but after the D'Agostino's trip, he'd protested less. Clint turned out to be Bucky's preferred Friend for store excursions -- the two of them nearly got arrested in a Bed Bath & Beyond for contemplating a little too loudly how best to weaponize various household goods -- but Steve remained his first choice to go food shopping with. They'd wander the aisles of a Gristedes or a Whole Foods and marvel at the wealth of options and buy updated versions of products they remembered to see if they tasted the same. Steve had done a fair bit of that at the start, so he knew which ones were the greatest disappointments, but otherwise he let Bucky make the selections. But they also went to the specialty markets and had adventures: Eataly, Gotham West, Fairway, Zabar's, a trip to Brooklyn for Smorgasburg that both of them couldn't decide was horrible or wonderful or both.

As time passed, Bucky's independence grew. He stopped going to therapy three times a week and started going to stores on his own and Steve was honestly glad of it. He would have been happy to care for Bucky for as long as Bucky had needed it, but seeing him thrive was much more satisfying. He'd lost some responsibility, but he'd regained a friend because Bucky sought him out now for reasons that didn't involve needing help with something and that was good for both of them. Steve had never been anything but pleased that Bucky had started building his own relationships with the other Avengers, even if Tony was having a little too much fun trying to be a bad influence, which bothered Pepper more than Steve because he knew that Bucky was a grown-up and Pepper couldn't say the same about Tony with any assurance. But Steve had been very much aware of how Bucky would have simple fun with the others and not with him as if Steve's time for him had to be rationed and saved for less frivolous purposes. Getting over that had been most of a session with Doctor Devadasan, to only incomplete effect.

For all of that and more, Bucky moving into his own apartment in the Tower was an unalloyed celebration for more reasons than Steve's microwave was now safe.

The next step was still a doozy: Bucky had graduated the basic course in how to get by, but now he needed to figure out how to thrive. "What do you want to do with your life now that it's yours again?" was an incredibly hard question and Bucky's first reaction had been to retreat and withdraw, push away from everyone who might reasonably expect him to answer the question if they asked it. Steve didn't push too hard right away because even he would be able to smell the hypocrisy, but the others had no such compunction. Bucky had already helped out the Avengers (mostly out of sight, always with the arm and his face covered), but being on the Avengers wasn't a full-time activity, especially if you never had to do press for it. 

(Steve did not hide his jealousy of Bucky there.) 

"I never really saw myself as a college boy," Bucky said as he looked at the glossy pamphlets he'd dropped on Steve's coffee table. He'd shown up earlier with a six-pack and a handful of paper and hadn't bothered to pretend he wasn't hiding from everyone and that he expected Steve to protect him. "I don't want to work in an office."

Bucky didn't have to work at all, ever again. Back when Maria and Natasha had been making damned sure that nothing at all involving either the Winter Soldier or James Buchanan Barnes was available to anyone, Maria had diverted a very significant sum of money into an untraceable bank account for Bucky. "You can call it back pay, you can call it reparations, you can call it whatever you want except blood money because it's not," she'd told him in the voice that had once cowed SHIELD agents to obedient stillness. "I very carefully took this money from the clean side of the ledger; this is nothing Pierce or any of his cronies ever touched. It was nothing you helped amass. This is honest money and you are not allowed to say it's too much because it's not. There isn't any dollar figure that can make up for what those bastards did to you. But if it makes you feel better, it's a helluva lot less than you could have gotten with the right lawyer should you have sued the WSC. So I'm actually kind of stiffing you."

"So don't work in an office," Steve told him as he went back into the kitchen to get the beer out of the freezer; he'd put the first couple in to get cold faster. "That's not why it got suggested. It's a good way to learn how to be a civilian again -- think about things that have nothing to do with spies or assassins or whatever, meet people who aren't spies or assassins..."

"I sense a theme here," Bucky said sourly, accepting the beer bottle. Steve sat down on the other side of the couch with his own beer and shrugged. "I don't think I liked school enough the first time. And I never thought about it before the war. I never thought it would be something I would do after the war."

"You never thought about it because you were earning enough money doing what you were doing and it would have taken you away from that," Steve pointed out, leaning forward to pick up the top pamphlet, a glossy thing for Columbia's School of General Studies. "And it's different when you do it because you want to, not because you have to." 

Bucky knew that Steve had gone back to school the other year and gotten his BFA; his smile at seeing the diploma on the wall had been one of his first when he'd first come in from the cold. 

"I'm not sure if I'd be doing it because I want to or because I have to," Bucky admitted, taking a long drink. "Everyone thinks I should."

"Everyone thinks you should do _something_ to get yourself better settled and thinking about the future," Steve corrected gently. "If that something isn't this, then it's your right to say no."

By the time Bucky had come back to Steve, he'd more than gotten used to having his own opinions again, having the right to say "no, I don't want to" in most situations. At least in that regard, he'd been the exact same stubborn cuss he'd been before the fall. Everyone had thought Steve was the intractable one; by now, most of them were aware of who had taught him to be so.

"You think I should do this," Bucky asked, not making it a question. 

"I think you'd be happy doing this," Steve replied. "But I wouldn't think any less of you if you went back to being a waiter or became a fireman or whatever else struck your fancy. I just want you to have a fancy to strike, that's all."

Bucky grunted a reply and then reached for the television remote; it was 7:15 and there would be a pre-game show for some hockey game. It turned out to be the Rangers, which made Steve frown and Bucky grin delightedly. They drank their beers and ordered Pakistani food off of Seamless during a tv timeout in the first period. 

"I'm afraid I'm going to wind up in the lesson," Bucky said out of the blue during the third period, after the goat curry and lamb kebabs and spinach and naan had been consumed. "I don't want to see my own handiwork." 

Once upon a time, this would have required a digression into Bucky's sense of authorship and ownership of the Winter Soldier's deeds, but Steve understood what he was saying now and knew it wasn't necessary. 

"So don't become a history major," he replied, eyes still on the game because Bucky was probably looking more vulnerable than he'd like right now. "You used to be good in math; I'm sure you're probably a lot better at it now."

What the years of mastering angles and trajectories and velocities and rotations hadn't sharpened, the serum, even the version in Bucky's system, would have. Steve was much better at physics now and he couldn't credit all of it to having to learn to throw the shield; the serum had made him think faster, make mental connections faster, and with it had come an ease in calculation that he'd never been blessed with back in his schoolboy days. 

"As long as I don't have to think about why," Bucky said darkly, then shouted out a gleeful cheer as the Rangers' generally incompetent power play proved the exception to the rule and scored. 

And thus began the slow glide of Bucky Barnes toward post-secondary education. Steve got everyone to back off a little, telling them that it had to be entirely Bucky's decision and there had to be nothing riding on it. Which everyone knew intellectually, but enthusiasm tended to take hold of the gas pedal at times. He kept the knowledge that Bucky had already decided to go but hadn't realized it yet to himself, instead waiting for Bucky to see it on his own. 

"Are you recycling or narrowing the possibilities?" he asked a week later when he noticed that the pile of pamphlets on Bucky's dining table had been weeded and was now down to a couple of choices, all community colleges. He knew better than to ask Bucky if he'd made his decision whether or not to go; it would just be gloating. 

"Both?" Bucky replied with a shrug. "This seems like it's more my speed -- basic, not too much of a commitment. It's less of a failure if I can't hack it, less of a drain if I can but don't like it."

Which was fine with Steve, less fine with Tony and, to a certain extent, Bruce. 

"CUNY's not what it used to be, Old Man," Tony explained. "City College hasn't been the Harvard on the Hudson since the sixties and none of the others have kept up the standards, either. The community colleges are full of remedial education classes and you can already read and write. It's for immigrants and kids who manage to graduate the city schools while still being functionally illiterate."

Bruce seemed to share Tony's lack of regard for the CUNY community college system, but he mostly thought Bucky was selling himself short. "You're setting your goals too low for your accomplishments. I think you'd be better served jumping right in to a four-year degree where you have a greater selection of courses and a higher level of instruction."

But Bucky was still Bucky and knew what he wanted. And Steve would have supported him fully for that alone, but he also thought that the demographics would be as much a boon as anything. In a student body full of people trying to make their lives better, be it after a rough start or simply learning how to get by in a new land, Bucky would find a kindred spirit or two.

Ginning up the material Bucky would need to have any kind of official life and apply to colleges was very easy. Natasha and Maria cooked up a 'legend' for Bucky, a cover with everything from a name (James Barlin, close enough that he could recover from a verbal stumble) to an educational and career history. James Barlin had a partial high school transcript and a GED and an SRB complete with the required DD-214 to prove that he'd been honorably discharged from the Army. 

"There's no point in making you anything but a vet," Natasha said as she went over the cover with him. "Everyone's going to think that you are, so you might as well go with their expectations. You were medically retired two years ago, TBI and the arm after you got blown up on patrol. Nobody will ask for details."

She held up three plastic ID cards. "This was your CAC card, your ID when you were active duty. You don't have to carry it, but you do anyway. This is your VA card. This is your retiree card, your current valid Department of Defense ID, and you do have to carry these two to get access to services or go to the USO or get free pie on Veteran's Day or whatever you want to do."

Bucky looked up at Steve. "We get free pie?" 

"We get free lots of stuff," he confirmed with a smile because Bucky looked almost mischievous. 

Natasha rolled her eyes and waited for Bucky's attention to return to her so she could continue. It took the better part of an hour to go through James Barlin's history and the contents of his wallet, which now had a Colorado driver's license (Barlin's last duty station had been Fort Carson), a Walgreens discount card, credit cards, and a metrocard bought with one of the credit cards. He had a social security number, a dummy address, proof of immunizations, and anything else the Admissions office might request. 

"These are the papers for you to use your GI Bill benefits so Uncle Sam will pay for this," Maria said as she printed off some pages. "Fill them out and be prepared to be frustrated because, as Sam Wilson will tell you, anything that has to touch the Veteran's Administration gets smelly brown stains on it. And yes, you need to do it; it fits with your cover and nobody with as much money as you have goes to public community college." 

Four months later, Bucky was registering for classes at BMCC with an eye toward an AS degree in Engineering Science. The engineering interest surprised Steve not at all; Bucky really had been good at math and had never minded spending time in Tony's lab while Tony studied his prosthetic -- especially if Tony would explain what he was doing and what they were looking at. Tony, for his part, had been happy to prattle on about what he was doing, surprisingly sensitive to Bucky's complicated relationship with the arm. Now, of course, Tony was exuberant in his enthusiasm for Bucky's choice of study topic while also being just as exuberant in his belief that Bucky should have chosen a different school to study it in. 

"You'll have someone to help you when you need it," Bruce offered weakly after Tony, late to dress for Date Night, had been dragged off by Pepper after one such explosion of enthusiasm.

"Whether you want it or not," Clint added cheerfully, dropping into one of the club chairs. It was going to be a Movie Night for those of them without dates. "If you don't think he's going to hack into your computer to check your homework, you're not thinking hard enough." 

Bucky, to Steve's utter lack of surprise, liked going back to school. A lot. He would admit, at least to Steve, that some of the required courses were very easy -- English Composition, in particular -- but he was also challenged by linear algebra and the computer-aided analysis class. It was the last that proved both Clint correct and, more importantly, that Bucky was on the right road to recovery. 

The Avengers (sans Bucky and Bruce) were flying back from a mission in Labrador -- HYDRA had been up to shenanigans -- and they were all slumped in their seats, exhausted and still wearing a bit of gore, when Tony shattered the exhausted peace with a loud bark of delighted laughter. 

"Well played, Almost-Centenarian. Well, played," Tony announced. Steve knew he wasn't talking to him, despite the fact that Bucky was hundreds of miles away and not currently on radio. Tony sounded almost impressed, which for Tony was very impressed indeed. 

Steve, who might've been most of the way to falling asleep, sighed deeply. "I know I'm going to regret asking, but what did he do?"

Tony waved his arm and whatever had been on his tablet was now on the quinjet screen nearest Steve, although he still needed to turn awkwardly to see it. 

It took him a few moments to realize what he was looking at and the only reason he got it was because he'd seen Bucky's laptop screen a few times while he'd been doing his homework. There were graphs and symbols and Steve never felt more like a guy with an art degree than at these moments because he had no idea what any of it meant. Except for one label on one graph that wasn't in Greek symbols and meaningless-to-him equations. 

"FUCK YOU, STARK. I KNOW WHAT I'M DOING," the label read. 

Once Tony circled the text with the pointer, it was Clint's turn to laugh, followed a moment later by Thor. Steve allowed himself a chuckle, mostly because he was too tired to offer more. He'd been thrown out of a third-story window and fought five guys who had been STRIKE team members for SHIELD once upon a time and his heart was just as sore as his limbs. 

"I'm probably going to have to build him something for this," Tony mused. 

"For snooping on him or for him catching you do it?" Natasha asked from the pilot's seat. They all knew the answer and Tony didn't bother replying. 

"I think you can probably name your prize," Steve told Bucky the following morning over a late breakfast. "I'd make it good because whatever it is won't be a deterrent, so you might as well enjoy it." 

Bucky, wearing jeans and a t-shirt he'd bought himself, eating Quaker Oat Squares because they were his favorite, and keeping an eye on the time because he had class later, smiled. "I think I'm good," he said, then smirked. "But I should probably ask for something snazzy because it's Tony and you're not wrong."

**Author's Note:**

> I spend a lot of time on [Tumblr](http://laporcupina.tumblr.com/) now, if you're into that sort of thing.


End file.
